Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 – 2009

Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and philosopher and the founder of structural anthropology. Influenced by Roman Jakobson's structural linguistics and his own field experience among the indigenous peoples of Brazil, he developed a method that sought to identify the unconscious logical structures underlying kinship systems, totemism, and myth. His Elementary Structures of Kinship, the four-volume Mythologiques, and the celebrated memoir Tristes Tropiques made him one of the most influential French intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work shaped the broader structuralist movement in philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences.